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But if that Principle can never fall to evil and we have
given a true account of the soul's entry or presence to body,
what are we to say of the periodic Descents and Returns, the
punishments, the banishment into animal forms? That teaching we
have inherited from those ancient philosophers who have best
probed into soul and we must try to show that our own doctrine is
accordant with it, or at least not conflicting.
We have seen that the participation of things here in that higher
means not that the soul has gone outside of itself to enter the
corporeal, but that the corporeal has approached soul and is now
participant in it; the coming affirmed by the ancients can be
only that approach of the body to the higher by which it partakes
of life and of soul; this has nothing to do with local entry but
is some form of communion; by the descent and embodiment of
current phrasing must be understood not that soul becomes an
appanage of body but that it gives out to it something of itself;
similarly, the soul's departure is the complete cessation of that
communion.
The various rankings of the universe will determine various
degrees of the communion; soul, ultimate of the Intellectual,
will give forth freely to body as being more nearly of the one
power and standing closer, as distance holds in that order.
The soul's evil will be this association, its good the release.
Why? Because, even unmerged, a soul in any way to be described as
attached to this universe is in some degree fallen from the All
into a state of partition; essentially belonging to the All, it
no longer directs its act Thither: thus, a man's knowledge is one
whole, but he may guide himself by no more than some single item
of it, where his good would lie in living not by some such
fragment but by the total of his knowing.
That One Soul- member of the Intellectual kosmos and there
merging what it has of partial into the total- has broken away,
so to speak, from the All to the part and to that devotes itself
becoming partial with it: thus fire that might consume everything
may be set to ply its all-power upon some trifle. So long as the
soul remains utterly unattached it is soul not singled out; when
it has accepted separation- not that of place but that of act
determining individualities- it is a part, no longer the soul
entire, or at least not entire in the first sense; when, on the
contrary, it exercises no such outward control it is perfectly
the All-Soul, the partial in it latent.
As for the entry into the World of the Shades, if this means into
the unseen, that is its release; if into some lower place, there
is nothing strange in that, since even here the soul is taken to
be where the body is, in place with the body.
But on the dissolution of the body?
So long as the image-soul has not been discarded, clearly the
higher will be where that is; if, on the contrary, the higher has
been completely emancipated by philosophic discipline, the
image-soul may very well go alone to that lower place, the
authentic passing uncontaminated into the Intellectual, separated
from that image but nonetheless the soul entire.
Let the image-offspring of the individuality- fare as it may, the
true soul when it turns its light upon itself, chooses the higher
and by that choice blends into the All, neither acting now nor
extinct.
But it is time to return to our main theme:
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